#9
Des Ark: “My Saddle Is Waitin’ (C’mon Jump On It)”
[from Don’t Rock The Boat, Sink The Fucker / Lovitt]

I approached my first listen to Don’t Rock The Boat, Sink The Fucker with a small amount of trepidation. I had been warned that I probably wasn’t going to like it by someone who knows my tastes incredibly well. For good reason, those instincts should have been spot on, but something about Aimée Collet Argote’s fearlessness at wearing her heart on her sleeve completely charmed me. Ok, admittedly, everything about her music charmed me.

“My Saddle Is Waitin’ (C’mon Jump On It)” opens with the line, “I wanna die with a halo on my head for all my friends,” and doesn’t back down even once on the notion that it’s difficult to be the perfect person that your friends expect you to be. There’s no resolution, there’s no happy ending, there’s no waking up to a brighter tomorrow. This is wallowing at it’s melodic finest and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

#10
Holiday Shores: “We Couldn’t Be Together”
[from New Masses For Squaw Peak / Two Syllable]

Though the rest of New Masses For Squaw Peak betrays this theory a good deal of the time, I’m fully convinced that Holiday Shores are ardent disciples of the Brian Wilson approach to writing a song and then tearing it down to nothing, putting it back together by cramming it with as much instrumentation as possible and then pulling out random bits and pieces of about ninety percent of that instrumentation. The end result sounds is a mixture of sounds that fit perfectly together and form a fully cohesive effort, but have none of the trappings that leave a good deal of music sounding tired and rehearsed.

“We Couldn’t Be Together” is one of these Picasso-like assembled songs that works at every moment in it’s short two and a half minutes. Piano chords chime in randomly, the keyboard wanders all over the place, the organ gives off an eerie “end of the circus” vibe and the attack of the bass rises and falls with reckless abandon. It’s a total mess and it all works exactly as it should. Every song should be deconstructed like this.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#11
G-Side: “I’m Sorry (Jake One Remix)”
[Unreleased]

I’m never going to be in a position where I can claim to be any sort of expert on hip-hop, but it’s been easy to see that there is a distinct changing of the guard in it’s ranks over the past couple of years. Younger artists like the gang behind Odd Future are striking out on their own early on in life while veteran rappers like the duo behind G-Side and Shabbaz Palaces are finding different avenues to introduce their music to a wider range of audiences at later stages in their career. It’s an exciting movement to watch and one which all of us as music appreciators are better off for.

The Jake One remix of G-Side’s “I’m Sorry” strips away almost all of the soundtrack from the original track and replaces it with a lazy rolling piano line and an insanely tight beat that will have you slowing down as you drive to match it’s laid-back tempo.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#12
Real Estate: “It’s Real”
[from Days / Domino] 

The greatest thing about the earliest period of The Beatles music was that all of it was performed by four guys with two guitars, a bass and a drum set. That’s it. No added accoutrements. Just plain old perfect pop music. And while there was definitely never anything wrong with the later period of their career when each song was crafted layer upon layer, instrument after instrument, there’s something pure and genuine about the simplicity of a song like “I’ll Get You”.

Real Estate is four guys. Two of those guys play guitar, one plays bass and the fourth sits behind a tidy little drum kit. On “It’s Real”, Real Estate continues that time honored tradition of crafting straightforward and honest pop music that could cure any battle with unhappiness. Watch the video and just try to have a bad day afterwards. Impossible.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#13
Bill Callahan: “Drover”
[from Apocalypse / Drag City] 

There are only a handful of songwriters working today that inspire as much devotion in their followers as Bill Callahan. The man who formerly hid behind the Smog moniker is on a short list of artists that includes Will Oldham, Jason Molina and Jeff Mangum in which their songs end up being more gospel than music. Callahan’s writing has long had the feeling of sounding incredibly of the moment while also remaining timeless.

As the lead track on Apocalypse, “Drover” introduces the wide open plains sound that permeates the bulk of the album. Callahan violently strums a nylon string classical guitar while random cymbal splashes break up the sounds of a distant fiddle. In a time when so many people are cynical about absolute pride in their country, Callahan casually sings “there’s something about this wild, wild country” and damn near makes you want to saddle up a horse on the spot and head for the Grand Canyon.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#14
Ganglians: “That’s What I Want”
[from Still Living / Lefse] 

I’m not sure I can sum up my feelings on this song any better than when I originally wrote about it this past August, so I’ll just quote myself:

On a hot summer day in July of 1993, my mom dropped by best friend and I off at a mall near Seattle, Washington. At some point during our allotted few hours away from the adults, we made our way to the record store (probably an atrocious Sam Goody or something) and proceeded to get lost inside the glow of scouting out and buying new music. One of the records we both left with that afternoon was the new release from the Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream. For two straight months, my friend would go on and on about all of the amazing songs that made up the record and all I could do was shake my head and admit that I still hadn’t made it past the very first track. “Cherub Rock” absolutely floored me. I was about to enter a pre-internet eighth grade later that year and finally starting to shed off the shackles of being stuck mostly listening to things my parents had around the house. I couldn’t get past that song. I wouldn’t go past it. I just kept starting and re-starting the track for months on end. My brain could not get comfortable with the fact that there might actually be music on the rest of the record that was anywhere near as good as that very first song.

I bring this up for a reason.

Last night as I made my way into downtown Portland for the monthly Science Pub on epigenetics (yeah, I put on my big boy pants last night), I threw on the new full-length from Ganglians for the very first time. As I passed over the Burnside Bridge with the sun setting off int he distance, the fuzzed-out bass line to “That’s What I Want” popped up, followed by those huge, booming, slow-build drums, almost as if they were scripted to soundtrack the cityscape opening up for me as I made my way from one half of Portland to the other. From then on, I found myself locked in another endless loop. The song would end, I would click the reverse button and start it all over again.

I’m hooked. Again. I can’t break this. And I don’t want to.

Please forgive my laziness, it’s been a long week so far.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#15
Gardens & Villa: “Star Fire Power”
[from Gardens & Villa / Secretly Canadian] 

More than once in the past year, I’ve christened 2011 as the year in which I truly embraced my love for bass lines that are recorded very dry and trebly and get shoved way upfront in the mix of songs. I’m addicted to them. It’s become a problem that I have no intention of fixing. Hearing “Star Fire Power” for the first time may have been the final domino to fall on my eventual acceptance of that particular musical fetish. In truth, I’ve probably heard this song more than any other since it’s release as I quickly turned it into the main ringer for my phone. A decision which I have yet to regret.

I don’t know if “Star Fire Power” is the stand out track from the debut record from Gardens & Villa, but it definitely has the kind of hooks that reach out, grab onto your collar and pull you inside of the song. I missed my chance to witness the band’s first performance in Portland and have not yet forgiven myself for denying my eyes and ears the privilege of seeing and hearing singer Chris Lynch lunge across the stage with his flute (yes, his flute) in tow.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#16
Wye Oak: “Plains”
[from Civilian / Merge] 

A couple years back, I had the opportunity to move to Baltimore. Having watched the first couple seasons of The Wire, I wasn’t totally convinced that it was the best option at that moment. In hindsight, I realize how ridiculous it is to base all of your feelings about a location solely on the antics that occurred on a fictional television show. Had I known more about the burgeoning music scene that’s been quivering under the surface for the past few years in Baltimore, I’m positive the view outside my window would be quite different these days.

Wye Oak is one of three Baltimore bands that is invading my humble list of songs this year (the others being White Life and one artist to be named later). Overall, Civilian was a challenging record for me. I had heard the title track pretty far in advance of the album’s ultimate release and was greatly anticipating a whole album’s worth of material in the same vein. What arrived was a wholly more difficult record that required more than a few casual listens to really appreciate and understand. But as with most albums that take just a bit longer to digest, the end result was something magical. “Plains” will catch you off guard every time you queue it up. I don’t care how ready you feel that you are for it’s onslaught of a “chorus”, it will destroy you each and every time in the best possible way. This duo needs to keep at what they are doing for a very long time.

[click to see all songs from the Top 40]

#17
Junior Boys: “You’ll Improve Me”
[from It’s All True / Domino] 

Because of my extreme affinity for the Junior Boys’ “Parallel Lines” (#1 on my 2009 list of songs) and the rest of Begone Dull Care, I was terrified to delve into It’s All True. If you’ve ever felt truly protective of a song and what it represents to you, you’ll understand what I mean. I was afraid of new music from Junior Boys simply because I just didn’t want it to be anything less than “Parallel Lines”. I’d built them up so much in my head because of that one particular song that I wouldn’t have been able to stand it if they had faltered.

Four months went by where I was in complete and total possession of It’s All True. Not one listen. Not even five seconds. Then out of sheer inspiration from a combination of the film Drive and being in Southern California, I threw on the record as I drove around the desert one afternoon. Three songs in, all of my panic melted away and “You’ll Improve Me” filled all of the air inside of the car and was all I thought about for six lovely minutes. So, the moral of this story is…go see Drive? I don’t know. Fuck, I love this song.

#18
Akron/Family: “So It Goes”
[from S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT / Dead Oceans]

It almost feels unnatural to separate a track from outside the context of Akron/Family’s immense concept that is S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT, but “So It Goes” is such an interesting and compelling track that it well deserves a little individuality.

Grabbing it’s title from an oft-repeated phrase from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “So It Goes” utilizes a stream of consciousness style of storytelling to detail the narrator’s change of mind about having an open heart in the form of giving spare change to “the homeless people on the street”. It’s a simple story and doesn’t take more than a few lyrical lines to reach it’s overall completion, but the band’s message is quite clear: Allow yourself to have an open mind. Allow yourself to have an open heart. Your actions and the actions of others might not make sense at first, but in time, they will. It’s a clever statement from a band that has has had many triumphs and will continue to do so the longer they continue to explore not just the limits of their music, but of themselves as well.